The flying parts part gets it wrong from the very start: "Before reading the book, I had assumed that the flying car was one of those ideas that sounds good on its face, but turns out not to work or be interesting in practice"<p>Well, it's exactly that.<p>But the book "concludes that there is no technological or economic reason why we can’t have flying cars with existing technology—indeed, why we couldn’t have had them already, if sustained work on them had continued past the 1970s."<p>Actually there are very good technological reasons, and attempts in 2022 would have the same problems as attemps in the 1970s or 1950s etc faced: namely, that flying and driving are different actions with different physical needs and tolerances from the vehicle, constraining the design, and making it ultimately inpractical except as novelty.<p>Except if we come up with antigravity or similar (or, perhaps, magical unicorn rays that lift the vehicle, which is pretty much the same wish, just without the tech-like jargon that makes the former sound plausible).<p>It's not a "they said heavier than air flight was impossible too" thing. It's a "they examined the domain every way possible for a century, with experimental, commercial, military, and other approaches, and they found it was a pipe dream due to inherent competing air and road vehicle needs".<p>The argument the post (and the book) puts forward is how useful it would be, if instead of using it like a car (e.g. to get around town) we used it to expand our radius of possible travel within an hour or a day. But that's exactly what they tried to use those flying cars for, and is just the same a no go.